A Bestiary of My Heart

King Cobra. Draculess. Son of the Pope. Black leather cats. Panther-parrots. A wild child. An eighty-year-old woman eight months pregnant. A man and a woman. A woman and a woman. A woman and a dead man. Flash floods and earthquakes. Spirit animals and strange herbs. The pig that knew the trick. A man’s heart roasted on a spit. A red ruby. Tall tales, cataclysms, transformations.

Victoria Nelson must stop being a national secret. What a writer she is! And what a mind she is—brilliant, original, imaginative; her language dazzles. A splendid critic and storyteller, she is also an authority on the literature of the spectral and the surreal. In A Bestiary of My Heart, Nelson and Deborah Barrett achieve a mesmerizing fusion of tale and drawing reminiscent of the high art of Bruno Schulz.
–Cynthia Ozick, author of Levitation and Art and Ardor

Rather than a bestiary, Victoria Nelson could well call her book a treasure chest or jewel box. She gifts the reader with gems, crowns, amulets—poetry. Resplendence. Deep Satisfaction.
–Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior and China Men